Opera and History

As a musician I played in  the pit orchestra for numerous operas, hence the material for my view on history.

It may be likened to Italian Opera:

A meaningless progression (after all  it was Doctor Johnson who said opera was an irrational entertainment)

Some fine moments, namely great solos with virtuosity that brings the house down

Some massive ensembles and spectacle

And a Tragic End.

Now I am not saying I hate Opera, but it really depends on my mood. Sometimes the intrinsic absurdity of a dying diva singing a coloratura aria in the process of her own demise  can be fun . .

As for the analogy itself, some would say that this contradicts the Biblical view of history as God's plan outworking in time.

I would answer that  my view is what men have made of history, for a godless world is subjected to futility and nihilism is the only real  rational view of a purely secular world. Additional to this I might invoke the  work of the Holy Spirit as being layered over the futility  and evil according to His grace, but to those who deny such there is only the meaningless progression, the other things I mentioned,

And the Tragic End

Western Democracies

Let me suggest, after having been subject to the heavy handed TV ad urging us all to get out and vote in the upcoming NZ General Election, that a vote is worth the integrity of the candidate for which it is cast. This would explain why democracies are dying in the West- because apathy is killing them. People know that the promises of politicians are empty rhetoric (aka lies) to be broken as soon as victory proves "A mandate" whereby the elected party can and does do as it pleases, promises and voters be damned.

And this happened in my own country quite recently. The government enacted a wildly unpopular measure, namely the selling off of State Assets.  In response to talk of a Citizens Initiated Referendum on the matter  The Prime Minister arrogantly said that the only referendum that counted was the General Election whereby he was elected, and that that did indeed provide a mandate. Therefore, in open defiance of the wishes of the public, hence the deep unpopularity, he and his government could do as they like  and so they did.

Democracy requires vigilance and effort on the part of the constituency. This the general population simply cannot be bothered to do, whether because they know it is wasted effort or out of simple laziness I cannot say, but the last election was won on the basis of the candidate appearing to be  "a good bloke" of the sort one would go for a beer with, the very man who then moved to sell off state owned assets to mass disapproval.

 Rather than spend money on campaigns to get people out to vote let the politicians act and believe with integrity and so earn people's respect. But that is rather too much to ask, for power corrupts. This does not necessarily mean  criminality and the taking of bribes, but it can and does mean a conceit  and arrogance as the power goes to their heads.

They think that they are serving the country, but that is part of the self deceit coming from the power that corrupts.

So they will continue to discredit democracy, which really is, as Churchill said, the best of a bad lot (I paraphrase from memory) as regards political systems, until it crumbles.

And  they will still have the effrontery to blame the apathetic voter who was rendered apathetic  by the knowledge that a promise denied   is a voter, or worse, voter bloc disenfranchised.

And so the farce which is human history continues

A word about Grace as I hold it

A word about my position.

If I continue posting here you will see me preaching grace. But this was not arrived at easily. I neither believe in nor have any respect for the so called hyper grace preachers. To invoke grace falsely is  still to deny it.

Thus I reject outright the  likes of  Joseph Prince  in the church; and the whole band of easy believists  who think that  grace means living as they please. It does not, but the only carnal alternative is legalism

For I am still an extreme legalist, a postition that is slowly killing me. I will add in all seriousness that if this continues it will  literally kill me as the stress, at my age, after continuing for more than thirty years, will eventually  lead to some kind of systemic collapse if by the personal intervention of God the Spirit, it is not brought to end and soon.

So I am not playing when it comes to this issue. I will either  come to live by grace or I will die.

Legalism is the very sin it fights., for Law is the power of  sin, stirring it up to make it worse. There is no salvation there, nor even repentance. it is also the very warp and woof of how man views righteousness. But
legalism is  the way that seems right unto men but which leads to death.

As regards the love of God, though the Spirit showed me this at my conversion nearly exactly 36 years ago, I now know that I ignored it. In my pride and fear  I preferred the Law. So, I preach no Linus blanket of love as it has been debased by too many preachers, by those holding the  opposite error to that the bullying done by hell fire fanatics who think that people need to be condemned for their own good, and who will only reap condemnation for themselves.

For God is Holy. This I have seen, Somehow

 I am no catholic, but the only christian thinker I know of who ever spoke of God the HOLY AND TERRIBLE is Ignatius Loyola.

And revelation of this, which somehow, by the Grace of God I saw - but don't ask me how-  back in 1983, is the informing core of my thought. But that I am stiull admittedly   a legalist  shows that it still has not penetrated, even after so many years.

Believe me, if I could repent myself into perfection I would, but my very longing for perfection is itself sin and as part of my righteousness must be repented of but only at the Lord's leading, which I must grudgingly wait for

So. I firmly believe in the Law, but for the wrong reasons, and I view God Almighty as HOLY AND TERRIBLE.

Thus is the vantage point from which I will write of grace.

For grace, when it finally sinks in to my proud and fearful heart, will have been learned the hard way.

This is my basis  for what follows: a struggle even longer, I regret to say,  than that of Paul the Apostle.

God have mercy on me and continue to as He has for so many years

Word of Faith Text Twisting 1: Little Gods

" Why do people have such a fit about God calling his creation, His men, little gods? What is He going to call them but the God kind? If you as a human being have a baby you all it a human kind, if cattle (sic) has another cattle they call it cattle kind. What is God supposed to call us? Doesn't the Bible say we are created in His image?"


Joyce Meyer, from the youtube video linked  below

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y4eVu2oxP8



It is a deeply disturbing, even terrifying, commentary on the state of the modern church  that such preachers are even granted a hearing let alone a following who hang off every word they utter.

The teaching here is of course dire blasphemy.

Separate and distinct from the motivation for such a thing, about which we can only speculate, there is the matter of twisted texts, and they are indeed twisted, which can and must be dealt with as a simple matter of scholarship

Firstly a word about "kinds."  Her argument is based on this biblical category and is incomprehensible without it. In the creation account of Genesis animals are not divided into species as we do so but in a broader category of kind

(add more)

No one would dispute that if a human has a baby the product is of the human kind, nor that if a cattle breeds the results is of the cattle kind.

But did God "have us"  such that we are of the God kind?

It maybe safely assumed that instead of the word have as in have a baby, the old KJV beget  and its tenses, of course, may be substituted, thus Abraham begat Isaac, who begat Jacob etc

How many children did God beget?

It should come as no surprise that  the answer, given that scripture interprets itself as a logical system, is itself spelled out in scripture, in no less than the most famous bible verse of all, the one the reference of which we all memorized in Sunday school as children: John 3:16

"For God so loved the world that he gave it ONLY begotten son"

How many begotten sons?

That is right. There was only one.

Jesus Christ may be described, with extremely careful qualification, as of the God kind but he was the Only one who ever was begotten as being of the God kind

As for the rest of us if we are in his family, what are we?

The Bible speaks of the spirit of adoption. Romans 8:15, a verse the believers in little godhood have either ignored or missed, is most explicit.: "You have not received the spirit of bondage back to fear. You have received the spirit of adoption whereby we cry Abba (ie Daddy)."  We are adopted children of God, not begotten, thus we are not of the god kind for there is only one God, big or little, and that is not  us. Moreover being a child of God does not require being begotten such that we would be of the God kind. Adoption is all that suffices for us, the fallen sons of Adam

Meyer's case falls apart for its fails to distinguish between being on one hand  a begotten son of God, of which there was only ever One, and  on the other hand being an  adopted child of God, which is what all christian believers are. Thus her talk of God having children of the God kind is ignorant and dangerous nonsense, based in part on a cavalier disregard for context that we come to expect from preachers of this kind 

But we are made in His image are we not? Indeed we are, but this does not imply that we are of the God kind. I can draw a stick man and say that it is made by me in my image, and that because I made it and I said it was in my image. But what could it do that I can do? Well, very little. It has shape and existence, and that is all. So it is with us in the image of God. Indeed how much more is it with the image of God compared to God Himself, for though I can do somewhat more than any stick image drawn in my likeness, compared to the infinity of the Almighty that margin of difference is not much at all. We cannot do all that God does and neither is this a requirement for us to be in His image.  In time past Calvinist theologians distinguished between those attributes of God that are communicable, that is to say which we share though being in his image, such as personality, mind, will; and those which are God's alone, namely all the attributes which have been prefixed "omni" - omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience.

The doctrine that we are gods seeks to fudge this distinction then tries to hide its deceit by adding a word that in fact never appears in scripture as related to god, namely "little".

No denial, and even a watering down thereof is a denial, no denial  of the fact that He an He alone is infinite and transcendent can be justified by our saying as Meyer tries to say, that we are only "little" gods. We are no gods at all.

where did the doctrine come from then? What scriptures  said something that the ignorant and unstable would be likely to misconstrue and twist  into arrogating godhood to themselves, as indeed thy have?
Psalm 82:6 : "You are gods and all of you are children of the most high"

Notes to self follow. To be completed . . .

Isaiah 41:23

John 10:34



the verb to be as ontic identity

as protestants we do hold that some uses of the verb to be in the bible are metaphoric, do we not? This is my body after all does not justifiy the repugnant practice of cannibalism


little gods, jesus; quote and the original OT  source

The Twin Poles of Error

Everywhere I go as regards church debate, which I still follow online from time to time,  I see many fingers pointing, much accusation. It is always only ever the other fellow who is wrong.

But the fact is that error has two poles. It is the case that the one denouncing error usually espouses the opposite error, but is so wrapped up in his own self righteous fury that he cannot see his own.

Thus while one man's description of  some other's error is reasonable enough the prescription, namely the recommended cure or course of action, so to speak, is wrong and often even more deadly

A case in point is in the ongoing furore over the Word of Faith doctrines that have taken hold of  at least the Protestant arm of the Western church and are even spreading to Russia, as I saw once on a youtube video.

Now make no mistake, I firmly hold that Word of Faith doctrine is pure heresy.

They claim that words are containers of supernatural power, that Christians are little gods, that Christ's death on the cross was not enough as he had to suffer in Hell then become born again, that faith is a substance, that worldly riches is the godly prosperity that all in Christ should have and some go as far to deny the divinity of Christ himself

I hope to demonstrate in another piece how these doctrines are twistings of scripture done either by the wickedly presumptuous  seeking to usurp the divinity of the Most High, or by the naive with no knowledge of other languages whereby naive literalism can and does lead to utterly disastrous results.

It is not my intention in this post here to refute the Word of Faith heresies. Ample work has already been done on that though I may add my voice to this in another post

But what do we have in the response to this?

Angry men. Angry men like John MacArthur, Paul Washer, Dave Wilkerson.

Is their anger righteous?  How do we  define the term?

Scripture says that the anger of men does not work the righteousness of God.

The anger of men, it can be seen, is vengeful and cruel. Anger is not  proven be righteous by the evil of the object of the anger lest the Soviet armies' raping (literally!) rampage across Europe in 1944-5 be seen to be righteous anger. It was not.

Righteous anger is commensurate with the Love of God. Of course hypocrites will claim that their anger is in love. But  I Corinthians 13 s clear as to the nature of love. If one's anger is not commensurate with this then it is sinful, indeed it is murder as the Sermon on the Mount points out. An anger that is as much FOR those it is angry at as well as AGAINST them - this  is the only kind that can ever be commensurate with the love of Christ, anger that would be quick to forgive.

This is clearly not seen in the manner or content of those who would terrorize and bully with the awful reality of hell, or fulminate, in defiance of Jude verse 9, against the heresies of the Word of Faith movement where simple expository preaching is sufficient.

They do not have the fruit of the Spirit, as is clearly seen. Of course neither do the Word of Faith'ers  who are so far out of field as to even be beyond the possibility of it except some major conviction of sin be done in their lives, buth when the likes of Joyce Meyer claims she no longer sins and is not a sinner then  that is ruled out almost entiurel;y

In response to such invocations of the Holy Spirit we have those who say that the scrupture is sufficient for the christian life.

Really? It is sufficient for the benchmark of determining doctrinal truth of experiences purporting to be of God but doctrinal truth of itself is only dead letter. True letter, mark you, but still dead.

As I said elsewhere the Book testifies to the Spirit. To ignore the Spirit is to defy the book as is to twist of ignore the Book to seek a counterfeit spirit, usually the imaginations of the carnal mind

When like John MacArthur they move from normal speech to rant in less than two minutes I know them by their fruit.

And that is my point.

 A carnal christian has nothing to offer by way of alterative to even the grossest heresies, for a carnal believer lacks the one thing that makes the difference: the personal realtionship with the Holy Spirit of Christ . Without  this telling anyone, even oneself , what one ought to believe does not make it so

Such a person has merely a code, a cause and a cosmology.  This is the opposite error to those who claim falsley that God is in intimate relationship with them and speaks to them daily

That he does not is shown by what they produce as testimony for such experiences and  it certainly imapcts on the doctrine  they espouse.

After all, if one claims that he is a little God did he get this from the Holy Spirit of Christ?

In all this the reality of real relationship with the Holy Spirit is what is trampled in the mud, and as these issues polarize, one side is taken as opposed to the other, but I hope to have demonstrated that both sides are in error here.

Hence the twin poles of error.

Of course I only chose one example for this, the Word of Faith controversy.

But it is, it seem to me, the standard response to any debate as is seen throughout history, with the appearance of soundness held by a legalistic adherence to creeds which I contend do not guarantee truth but conceal unbelief behind the hypocrisy  which is all legalism is capable of

By way of other examples: The Tri theists were opposed by professors of  various kinds of  Oneness  theory, from Arianism to the modern pentecostal irruptions of same

The monophysites were opposed by the Nestorians who maintained that Jesus was two people.

Legalism is opposed by licentiousness.

And it goes on

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Meikle the Musician: My Advice to Young Musicians

I did say this was a Miscellany, and not merely a sounding board for  matters theological.

I speak only of classical music, classical in the broadest popular sense  for the technical meaning of the term is the music of Haydn, Mozart and their contemporaries.

I have neither knowledge nor interest in the various brands of popular music  current these days  so would not dream of offering any advice to musicians of that type, having no basis in experience or knowledge to do so.

For many years I played Double Bass in my professional orchestra, the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra. It was not the best orchestra even in my country, but my lack of commitment was such that I could not bring myself to pursue a career where the talent that  I grew to find burdensome would have led

They said I was good, very good, brilliant even. So they were offended or perplexed when I left them

But the fact is I drifted in to Bass playing and merely drifted along, having no idea what else to do. Inertia got me in, back in 1972, and kept me in for forty years.

My point is this, my advice to young musicians.

If you do not love the craft with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, as I did not, I strongly urge you to get out now while you are young enough to find something else that may fulfill.

Music is a good enough servant. One comes home, puts the stereo on and has a pleasant dinner. But music is a harsh mistress demanding only  the very highest  price before giving of her delights.

For the music professions demands total commitment, something between the discipline of the athlete and the monk, because learning an instrument is not like riding a bike, and singing, from what I have heard, is even less so. The skill must be maintained  by daily effort. But this I found drudgery, even if my talent was such that I may have needed less practice than most.  Yet even  such work as my talent required was more than I was willing  to give and all my native ability  did was delay by decades the inevitable, namely disgust and eventual resignation  Only love for music and for the business of making music can suffice to make it worth the effort.

And if you do not love the music trade but are a musician, and I saw some over the years, and became one of them myself, it will eat you alive.

For I burnt out, grew to hate the double bass and the profession and bitterly resented the sense of obligation those who trained me inculcated me with.

So, to summarize. Love it. Love it with all you have. Or leave it. And do so as soon as you can, otherwise you may be loaded with regret, as I have been. Without love even that which gives the greatest ecstasies, and I do assure I know the joys of an inspired performance, as fleeting as they are, such will turn to ashes

Reflections on End Times 1: Date Setting

I am not an expert on this issue because, having considered it at some depth, I do not think it has the all consuming importance that some give it.

I am inspired to write this because of the story of the Sudanese woman Miriam Ibrahim sentenced to death for  apostasy from Islam, that is for becoming a christian. There was an international outcry  and the sentence was abrogated.

My point in making the observation is that Jesus said we, His people, would be hated by all nations. If this were the very last generation with the Great Tribulation just around the corner then instead of an outcry demanding that Sudan observe international conventions of religious freedom, there would have been a cry for Ms Ibrahim's blood as one of the hated Christians, and that  with no dissenting voices.

This did not happen.  Not only that but her death sentence was uncommon enough to be newsworthy. If we were hated by all such would be commonplace, and will be in due course.

That is to say we are not at this point in time  hated by all nations as is predicted for the time of the Great Tribulation, therefore we are not the last generation.

I regard it as a total failure of imagination to think that things could not get worse than they are. They will get much, much worse. I invite the reader to think about this.

I think a voice of sanity is needed on the issue of end times, and I hope to be somewhat instrumental in providing one.

Jesus said in Acts 1:6-8 "It is not for you to know the times the Father has set by his authority". He said this when His disciples asked if He was about to restore the Kingdom of Israel.

He also said in Matthew 24:36 that  " the day and hour [of his coming] no one knows,  not the angels in heaven,   nor the Son, but only the Father."

One would think that this were sufficient, but attempts to wiggle out of the plain truth of these passages have been ongoing and ingenious, particularly when Luke 12:39 tells us why we cannot ever know the time of the Coming of the Son of God before the event.

For Luke 12:39 does indeed tell us why we can never know. It says "And know this: If the master of the house knew at what hour the thief would come he would he would have watched and not permitted his house to be broken in to."  Jesus here is the thief in the night. The master of the house is Satan (for KJV readers: there is no sense of "goodman" in the Greek. This was an Elizabethan idiom only.)

If we know when the thief is coming so can Satan who need only monitor church communications.

Therefore we can never know before time and moreover have no need to. But even this has been defied by one who presumed to set the name of the antichrist,  namely president Erdogan of Turkey, to rise in 2015 in conjunction with some blood moons, that is to say blood red lunar eclipses to occur with an unusual frequency in the next year or so. My source told me that as he was not talking about  the Second Coming and rapture per se then it was a fair call to set dates.

Only the desperate would try it. The definitive sign is the antichrist's declaring his own divinity in the yet to be rebuilt Jerusalem Temple.  Historically speaking  predicting the peripherals has failed as much as predicting the Main Event itself. Until  the Man of Sin arises, to be seen not by numbers in his name but by what he does, then we are playing foolish games as if "pin the name tag on the antichrist" were a party game for children.  As to the rise of the Anti Christ I may write on this in a further essay

Some assert that the Acts 1 passage was addressed to the Jews and not the Church, therefore does not apply to us . This cannot be the case for it was not a public address to the nation of Israel, such as Jesus had made on other occasions. It was a private talk to his disciples, the last he gave before his Ascension. Even though the disciples were Jews to a man they were the core of the Church. Thus this was addressed to the church and therefore to us. It is not for us to know the times the Father has set by his authority.

But, some may respond, what about Paul's statement "But of the time and seasons there is no need that I write you, for you know very well . . . . . " I Thessalonians 5:1

Does this contradict Jesus or does it apply to a different set of people or situation?

It cannot contradict the words of the Lord, for then scripture would be errant and collapse. But he was addressing the  church, as was Jesus Christ , and because the situation of Luke 12:39 can never change before the Second Coming there is no possible way in which it can be got round

How to resolve?

I distinguish between a relative chronology and an absolute one . We cannot know the times before hand so as to set dates, but as were are told to watch and pray we can recognize events as they happen, but not before, and will take encouragement from this  that the Lord is near. We can know the order of things to come, the relation of events, hence my term relative chronology, but not the dates, not, as I term it, an absolute chronology. For instance: the man of Sin will not appear until there has been a great apostasy. He will declare himself God in the Jerusalem Temple, yet to be rebuilt, and stop the sacrifice. But  When? When these things happen? It is not for us to set dates.

To summarize we are to know the relative order of events and watch for them.  This is  the meaning of the injunction "watch and pray" which in fact would be vitiated if we could set dates.

Others have said that Matthew 24 passage has been mistranslated. It  should read "no one yet knows the day and hour." and presumably the time limitation here has passed and we not only can but must know

But this fails on both linguistic and logical grounds

Oudeis, the word for no one is declared without warrant to be two words OUD and EIS. This is excused on the grounds that ancient Greek was written in all capital letters with no letter spacing. But this never gives license for people to make word breaks arbitrarily in order to get around the plain meaning of a passage.

Oudeis appears 98 times, as an electronic concordance tells me. And each time the meaning is plain . It is not only a clear meaning but a decidedly emphatic meaning. There is contextually no basis whatsoever to adduce another meaning here in Matt. 24:36.

However opponents are nothing if not resourceful for  it gets worse than that. One source for this idea is the      Concordant Version of the Sacred Scriptures. They claim that the OUD is a corruption of OUPO  which does indeed mean "not yet."  But this is a species of desperate gymnastics. First a word break is invoked without any reason then to back it up special pleading is employed  to make a plain syllable a corruption of a word. When I asked my source, a creationist scientist, to justify these things as being necessarily so  I got no reply.

Eis, or more properly Heis (the rough breathing, or letter h, has to be guessed by context, but, I ask why should it?) means "one" as in the master who gave  five talents to one servant and three to another

This split word  interpretation  of "no one yet  knows" also fails on logical grounds. One cannot get around it by saying that this passage does not speak of the Second Coming, or that dates can be set if we appeal to this verse on things other than the Second Coming Matthew 24:36 in its plain context is about the Second Coming exclusively.

Therefore to vitiate the plain meaning of the passage is to set up a contradiction with Luke 12:39

 There is. an old dictum of Bible study I heard years ago. "If plain sense makes common sense seek no other sense". There is no reason to go beyond the consensus of NT Greek scholars on this one and all arguments of those keen to do so have failed

The meaning stands. No one knows the time of His Coming, nor, I might add, of the future at all, for the passage speaks in the plural, "no one can know the times"

To summarize: Matthew 24:36 applies to us and still applies  to us if there were any doubt about that, and must do or else Luke 12:39 is violated.

Acts 1:6-8 is addressed to us  the  Church, is not modified or contradicted by I Thessalonians 5:1 and also stands necessarily so because of Luke 12:39.

On this bedrock of scripture I unreservedly stand and say that date setting of any kind concerning future events in the End Times is blasphemous futility.

If we had any regard for the reputation of the gospel as to when these predictions fail, and fail every one of them has, we would refrain and seek to repent of our presumption in making them. I acknowledge the role of the prophet. They can predict the future subject to the limitations that they would never contradict scripture. But those who predict any future  down to dates on the basis of real or imagined scholarship are on shaky, even perilous, ground indeed

To conclude I ask why is this matter important?

For centuries people have set dates, and been egregiously spectacular in their failures. William Miller of 1844 springs to mind, but at least he repented  and retired into deserving obscurity. Most lately the late Harold Camping came up with an elaborate scheme, absurdly so in my opinion, to prove that the Rapture was on the 21 May 2011

Each failure promoted jeering among those who regard themselves as enemies of the Gospel . But too many making such presumptions  have no regard for the fact that the Name of God is blasphemed among the nations because of us.

For such folly in open defiance of scripture brings the Gospel into disrepute, and that we need to know beforehand what the Lord has told  us to recognize as it happens is simply a sign of bad faith and disobedience on the part of His people.

Let us cease and desist lest we bring His wrath down upon us.